Here's the solution to your labor shortage

Jonathan Miller, president of Element Bars, has been hiring ex-offenders for years and says he's never had a bad experience with such ­employees.

Entry-level jobs are hard to fill at Eurest, a food-service and hospitality firm that employs about 1,000 people in Chicago. So James Kallas, Eurest's division president, is working with a nonprofit to build a basic culinary-skills training program. The program has the potential to supply Eurest with 30 to 40 well-trained employees a year.

The new employees will have something in common other than strong footing in culinary basics. They will all have a criminal conviction in their past, a past Kallas is willing to overlook. "We need the people," he says. "There are people out there who are willing to change." The jobs, many of them full time with benefits, will pay $12 to $15 an hour and provide ample opportunity to climb the career ladder. "Hospitality is a very forgiving business, one of the few left where you can grow into a supervisor or manager role," Kallas says, noting that he started in the business 30 years ago.

With the U.S. unemployment rate at 4.1 percent and 6 million jobs unfilled nationwide, hiring people with criminal records, even those who have served jail or prison sentences, has moved from corporate kindness to corporate necessity. To fill jobs, companies are looking with fresh eyes at a sizable demographic that has historically been all but excluded from the workforce. According to National Employment Law Project data, an estimated 42 percent of Illinois' 9.8 million adults have arrest records. Experts, however, say that such data can be unreliable or misleading. For instance, the FBI considers anyone arrested on a felony charge to have an arrest record, even if the arrest did not result in a conviction.

"People are starting to realize that a huge percentage of the population has records," says Victor Dickson, CEO of Safer Foundation, the nonprofit with which Eurest is creating the culinary training program. By using an arrest record to deny employment, "we are excluding a large percentage of the population from the pool of available workers," Dickson says.

Hiring ex-offenders can fuel the country's unprecedented economic expansion for a few more years, says Jeffrey Korzenik, an economist and chief investment strategist at Fifth Third Bank in Chicago. About 19 million people in the U.S. have a felony conviction, according to National Employment Law Project data. "When you run out of labor, within a year or so you hit a recession," Korzenik says. The economy, at its current 2 percent annual growth rate, creates 200,000 nonfarm payroll jobs a month. To fill them, "we have to take people from the sidelines," he says.

Hiring ex-offenders "used to be the right thing to do. Now it's the smart thing to do," says Johnny Taylor Jr., CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, a national trade association. The organization views hiring ex-offenders as a diversity and inclusion measure, because they have been excluded from hiring and because the population is overwhelmingly black and brown men.

Human resources policies are evolving to recruit and hire this population, Taylor says. "A big focus now is on disclosure and the guarantee that (a criminal record) won't automatically exclude you," he says. He's referring to "the box," or the portion of a job application that asks if the applicant has been convicted of a crime. A national "ban the box" movement began during the Obama administration, and Illinois passed a law in 2014 forbidding employers from asking about criminal convictions until after an applicant's qualifications have been reviewed.

Taylor says his organization does not condone banning the box. "You could bring in someone who presents a risk," he says. That said, a checked box lumps those convicted of passing bad checks with people who've done time for more serious crimes. Human resources departments' task is to get the story from each individual and take it from there. "We don't overreact because a person has been incarcerated," he says. Employing people with criminal backgrounds "is not right for every employer," Taylor says, "but it is right for more employers than we acknowledge."

Tom Decker, president of Chicago Green Insulation in Highland Park, makes an effort to find and hire ex-offenders. Two of his six employees have criminal backgrounds. "We've all made mistakes, and returning citizens are tagged as the worst action in their lives," Decker says. To vet employees, Decker conducts an "interview" (actually a tryout) that consists of five eight-hour paid shifts. At the end of the tryout, employees vote on whether to hire the newcomer. "It's all out in the open," Decker says. Hiring returning citizens, or people who have served jail or prison sentences, has eliminated labor problems for him. "I have 300 resumes of people interested in working with me and I don't have an HR department," he says.

The Chicago Transit Authority's Second Chance program hires people who have served sentences for nonviolent crimes. The program, launched in May 2011, has employed 867 in full-time, yearlong positions cleaning buses. Of those 867, 260 are now employed full time at the CTA, says Terry Peterson, chair of the Chicago Transit Authority board. The CTA works with 14 social services agencies to source, train and provide support services for ex-offenders.

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Jane Addams Resource

“What I found out was a lot of companies didn't want to hire people with backgrounds,” said Clyde Spight, a machinist who went through training at Jane Addams Resource.

Jonathan Miller, president of custom energy-bar maker Element Bars, has hired ex-offenders since he launched the company a decade ago. The Northwest Side firm now has five ex-offenders, one of whom has been at Element Bars since the company's beginning. Miller asks employees about their pasts and runs background checks. "I ask the question once: 'Does your background affect your ability to do your job?' And that's the end of it," Miller says, adding that he has never had a negative experience hiring someone with a criminal background.

Miller's 30 employees do not know who among them has a criminal past. That information belongs only to Miller and upper-level managers. "I take on a greater level of risk by hiring these employees," Miller says. "For me the risk is worth it."

Safer Foundation works with hundreds of companies in training and placing people with criminal pasts. At Jane Addams Resource, another nonprofit with a workforce-development program, 36 percent of its trainees have a criminal past. Cara, a workforce-development nonprofit in Chicago, has seven returning citizens among its staff of 80. Half of Cara's 1,000 workforce trainees have a criminal record, and 25 of the 50 firms with which Cara works are willing to hire people with criminal convictions.

Reluctance to go public about hiring ex-offenders is the rule rather than the exception. "People are waiting for the first brand name to move and to testify," says Cara CEO Maria Kim. She adds that despite the need for skilled labor, ex-offenders are still a tough sell for Cara, which has a dedicated staff that reaches out to local firms. Its success rate is about 25 percent. "There's a fundamental bias against the notion of a second chance," says Kim. "There's a bit of a scarlet letter."

Aware that the world isn't overflowing with opportunities for them, ex-offenders tend to work harder and are loyal to companies that offer them a chance. The result is a 72 percent yearly retention rate for the population, which is equal to or better than the normative population's, Kim says. When companies see the retention rate, "their shoulders begin to relax a little," she says.

If companies aren't willing to talk, the people they've hired are. Clyde Spight carries a conviction for aggravated battery. After spending four months in a Cook County Jail boot camp and eight on probation, he found himself working dead-end jobs, making "barely enough to scrape by," he says. Spight, 40, says he had worked steadily before his conviction, at age 30, and didn't expect to have such a hard time re-entering the workforce. "What I found out was a lot of companies didn't want to hire people with backgrounds," he says. Tired of struggling, he found Jane Addams Resource's training program and is now a machinist in the Chicago location of a global manufacturer. He's held the job for three months and makes good wages plus benefits.

"Everybody's situation is different," Spight says, when asked what advice he'd give employers. "I don't feel a person should be held back or disqualified for positions they may be skilled enough to obtain just because they made a mistake in their past. Companies should be more open."